Paving the Last Mile for Multi-Channel Multimedia Presentation Generation

Users of multimedia applications today are equipped with a variety of different (mobile) devices that each come with different operating systems, memory and CPU capabilities, network connections, and also different software such as multimedia players. To be able to efficiently deliver appealing multimedia presentations to all the users, we need to overcome the last mile in multimedia presentation delivery and meet the different requirements at the end user’s site. Consequently, one needs to provide multi-channel multimedia presentation generation such that all different users can get and use it in their individual device configuration. With our approach, we aim at developing an abstract multimedia content model that embeds the central characteristics of today’s multimedia presentation formats: the definition of the temporal and spatial layout as well as the interaction possibilities. The abstract model allows to be easily transformed to different multimedia presentation formats on different devices and by this serve different output channels. We present our abstract multimedia model and transformation process that allows to compose and to generate suitable multimedia presentations for each different channel such as a SMIL 2.0 presentation created for rendering on a PC or a SVG Tiny presentation designed for a mobile device. With our implementation, application developers can efficiently realize on-the-fly multichannel generation of multimedia content.